I would've thought that there would be more interest in this (being that Microsoft is taking it's sweet time with any updates). I'm looking towards to the next version - I got artists that aren't listed in the Zune Marketplace.

Alright guys
After quite a long time of no updates, the Zune DevKit makes it finally possible for me to provide you with an actually working version of ZuneConsole.. no hassle with the whole connection stuff anymore

I thought of basically letting you guys download images from the net or from a local computer directly onto the Zune and assigning them to artists. Same goes for biographies (I guess you won't wanna write them on the Zune's keyboard).

Alright, here's the first screenshot as promised.. showing the main menu of the app. Note that it's looking way better in realtime, since the background is also moving

As for the basic flow of the app, I'm inclined to your opinion
So here we go, here's my first concept of the app:

1) Start it up (obvious, huh? xD)
2) Click "Edit Artist"

{Steps 3 and 4 are for custom artists not known to Zune}
3) Enter the name of the artist you want to edit
4) The app prompts you with the artist's UUID you enter on the website (see below)

5) On any local PC, you browse to a specific website I'm gonna setup
6) There, you can do the following things:
- Specify artist info to be uploaded to the Zune
- Specify artist imagery to be uploaded to the Zune
7) Once you're done, the website will prompt you with a Download code, you'll enter on your ZHD
8) The app will now know what to download and where (e.g. which artist to assign it to) to store it
9) Download's finished, job's done, repeat process

The artist info will be left 12-24 hrs (depends on the server load) on the server for your Zune to receive before it gets deleted.

So why all the hassle of still needing to have a seperate PC available you might ask yourself? Well, I figured it might be kinda hard to type tons of artist bio and information with the small Zune Keyboard. Also on a PC you might just copy and paste info from wikipedia, etc., speeding up the process even more.

Now that's my initial concept. Got any questions, feel free to ask. Also, if you can think of any other way that might be more useful than the method I proposed, don't hesitate to tell me your idea
In the end, I'll realize the idea suiting you guys the best.

@Photoman: Well, since when and what date are similar questions, I'm just gonna answer one :P basic features like editing artists known to zune, about 1-2 weeks from now. Advanced features like eiting artists not known to zune I can't tell you since I gotta find the storage place of their UUIDs first

Man, am I excited for this thing to come out! But I do have one question about artists from other countries. I'm kind of nervous that the Zune might not allow artist names to be registered in character sets like Unicode, and that would mean that all of the Japanese artists in my collection would have to have their names rewritten in English. So my question is this: would ZuneConsole allow me to create custom artist profiles for foreign artists using Unicode and/or other character sets?

Looks good. My only suggestion is that we can define our own servers or perhaps even have a local server that will allow us to do this. Not that I don't trust the outside servers, but there would be a definitive advantage to having it on the local machine as well.

That's the plan I'll have a settings menu to let you set custom server urls so you can host a private server if you want to
Public servers would have the advantage of being able to store info created by other users which you could use on your Zune if you were lazy :P